Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
Jesus loves me! This I know, as He loved so long ago,
Taking children on His knee, saying, “Let them come to Me.”
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
Jesus loves me still today, walking with me on my way,
Wanting as a friend to give light and love to all who live.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– William B. Bradbury (1816-1868), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)
The most difficult process for any of us is attempting to cultivate genuine trust. We live in a world where it seems that there is no one that we really can trust. We begin with our parents’ little loving lies, and we move on to the lies that schoolteachers tell us. The first few times that we realize that an adult has told us some untruth – and maybe those tales about Santa are the first real lies that we discover – being lied to by grownups feels devastating. But then, if we are wise, we learn to adopt a healthy skepticism that is self-protective, true, but it also makes us sad. Think of all the lies that you and I now hear every day! From politicians, and from governments at all levels. From commercials for all sorts of goods and services. From friends and relatives. From bosses. From employees. In big and little ways, and even if some lies might be acts of kindness, is there anyone in our lives who does not at least occasionally tell us some untruths?
And perhaps even worse than all the lies put together are life’s awful, unexpected betrayals. The job we have trusted for the past ten years has unexpectedly let us go. The perfect health that has been our comfortable status for our whole life long is all at once and forever gone, just with that look on our doctor’s face. The spouse that we love, and with whom we are rearing children who are only halfway grown, breaks the news that he or she is parting ways now, and there will be a divorce. Especially this last betrayal feels so unthinkable to me that I hesitate to type the words! And yet statistically, some version of that particular betrayal happens in close to half of American families.
And then we have the worst destroyer of trust imaginable, which underlies the lives of many people who are now or who ever have been Christians. What about God’s betrayal? We were taught as little children that we could love and trust God! We likely sang our frame-song in Sunday school. And then, as we grew older, in many traditional Christian denominations we were taught that God might condemn us to burn in hell forevermore, even for what seemed to be trivial infractions. Stop and think about that. Christian doctrines have softened quite a bit over the last century or so. But for most of Christian history, and well into the twentieth century, even children were taught as they grew older that actually, you know, there is a fiery hell. And God will not hesitate to send you there. The Roman Emperor Constantine’s Christianity as he conceived it was ruthlessly fear-based. It used the constant threat of a fiery hell to keep Christians in line, and to such an extent that the fire-and-brimstone stench of sulfur lingers over many Christian denominations to this day. To give you some examples:
- Calvinism includes the concept of predestination. Not only is there a fiery hell, but a considerable number of Calvinist Christians are born already predestined to go straight to hell when they die. No matter how good you are during your lifetime on earth, if you are a Christian born into that particular version of Christianity, you might well have been predestined for hell without knowing it, and there is nothing you can do to change your ghastly fate.
- Unbaptized Catholic infants go straight to hell. Nowadays the Catholic Church is more merciful, and it sends unbaptized infants only to purgatory perhaps. But I recall reading a sermon that had been delivered around the turn of the twentieth century to Catholic parents who had not managed to get their infants baptized before they died. Not only are their babies now roasting alive forevermore, but those babies will be allowed to come up from hell for a moment to see the baptized-before-death babies playing happily in a sunlit heaven before the unbaptized babies are thrown back down into hell to continue to roast for all eternity.
- Some Christian theologians insist that Jesus taught more about hell than anyone else ever has. They say this because they know nothing about the afterlife, and they mistake Jesus’s words about the Outer Darkness for His having talked about hell. In fact, the genuine Jesus never talked about hell at all! The Outer Darkness is the lowest afterlife level, and we might put ourselves there for a time if we cannot forgive ourselves during our post-death life review. When I first realized after I had done all that afterlife research that I could see from the way Jesus was talking in the Gospels that He actually knew about the post-death life review and the Outer Darkness that the dead were telling us about, I had literal chills! OMG! Jesus really is real! But the Outer Darkness is by no means a fiery hell. Not at all.
Instilling in people a fear of God is Roman Christianity’s worst sin by far. Fear is the opposite of love. In fact, you absolutely cannot love what you fear! Having spent fifty years doing afterlife research, and having networked with others who have also done considerable afterlife research, I can tell you for an absolute certainty these two central facts: there is no fiery hell, and nor is there ever any judgment by God. What you always get from the genuine God is nothing but infinite love! But none of us feels worthy of God’s love, and so we pull back, we turn away, we feel unbearably shy. In that painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as God and Adam reach to touch one another, God’s finger is straight. It is Adam’s finger that is bent. Still, and believe it or not, you in particular are God’s best-beloved child.
All right. It is time to fix this now!
There are slightly fewer than eight billion people currently living on earth. And of all of those eight billion people, perhaps only a few thousand of them – maybe ten thousand? – are educated as Gospels scholars without being traditionally religious. Not many. And of those eight billion people, there also is a different, and a very much tinier group who have been sufficiently fascinated by the afterlife evidence and the evidence for a greater reality to become truly expert in those areas. These serious afterlife scholars cannot be more than a few hundred people worldwide. In fact, this second group is so small that I think I know who most of them are. Of course, what would be good would be if someone with a lot of Gospels knowledge and also a lot of afterlife knowledge could find ways in which those two bodies of knowledge might be used to validate one another, right?
But the odds are long against there being any one person with sufficient interest in two such different areas to spend enough time in both to become a useful expert in both of them. In fact, insofar as I am able to tell, out of the almost eight billion people living on earth, the only person who is sufficiently eccentric to have built her hobby-life around studying Jesus and also studying the afterlife simultaneously has been me. And it is only now that I realize what a handy thing this peculiar combined body of knowledge really is! Because, sure enough, all you deluded Gospels scholars, I can personally testify to you that Jesus knows all about the afterlife! Since, as it turns out, so do I.
Here is a typical passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus talks about condemning people to the Outer Darkness: “And when Jesus entered Capernaum, a Roman Centurion came to Him, begging Him, 6 and saying, ‘Sir, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, terribly tormented.’ 7 Jesus said to him, ‘I will come and heal him.’ 8 But the Centurion replied, ‘Sir, I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, “Go!” and he goes, and to another, “Come!” and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this!” and he does it.’ 10 Now when Jesus heard this, He was amazed and said to those who were following, ‘Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel. 11 And I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; 12 but the sons of the kingdom will be thrown out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 13 And Jesus said to the Centurion, ‘Go; it shall be done for you as you have believed.’ And the servant was healed at that very moment” (MT 8:5-13).
What actually is going on here? I submit to you that this is not about judgment or punishment, and it certainly is not about hell! Once again, and emphatically, there is no hell. Let’s look at what is actually happening in this Gospel excerpt:
- Jesus is praising the Roman Centurion’s great faith in Him. He is saying that the Centurion’s faith is exemplary, and that unless Jesus’s own followers can learn to emulate such great faith, they may end up judging themselves harshly during their individual post-death life reviews, and putting themselves into the Outer Darkness after their deaths for a time as a result.
- Jesus speculates that others “from east and west” who are not even Jews may also become as faithful as this Centurion. And if they do, they may similarly after their deaths attain heavenly status with the Hebrew prophets, well ahead of Jesus’s complacent Jewish followers.
- In the Outer Darkness there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. This sounds as if Jesus is describing a gloomy place of dismal regret. A place where people are unhappy, frustrated, and depressed, for sure! But is He saying that the Outer Darkness is a fiery hell where people are screaming as they are roasting alive? Clearly not!
- As Jesus well knew, avoiding the Outer Darkness is a simple matter of keeping one’s spiritual vibration high. As long as His followers are loving and forgiving, and as long as they are showing faith like that Centurion’s remarkable faith in Jesus, their personal post-death spiritual vibrations will keep them far above the Outer Darkness level.
Jesus even tells us in the Gospels that neither He nor God ever judges us! He says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). And then when we understand that God doesn’t judge us, Jesus adds that He Himself doesn’t judge us, either. He says, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). I guess that all those theologians who keep saying that Jesus talked a lot about hell must never have bothered to actually read the Gospels, right? The only Bible bits that might give any support to their theory that Jesus talked about hell are a few spots at the back of some of the Gospels that were added at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE at Constantine’s direction. Those later Roman additions have a wholly different flavor from the actual Gospeel words of Jesus, in that they show Him talking about judgment, sheep-and-goats, and such hard things that we know that Jesus never would have said. Or spots in the Book of Revelation that Constantine also added. We simply snip off those obvious later additions, and we have back just what Jesus actually said.
Sometimes, while Thomas and I are writing a blog post, Jesus will read it over our shoulders, and then He might offer us His suggestions. In the case of this blog post, His suggestions were emphatic! As I was waking up on Wednesday morning, I heard Jesus’s distinctive voice strongly in my mind. He suggested the frame-verse, and the tale of the Roman Centurion (which I realized at once was a perfect choice), and He asked me to give you this message from Him: “Beloveds, you cannot fully trust anything that happens to you on the earth. What happens here is meant for your spiritual growth, and it will be painful, and you will often feel betrayed. So you can fully trust no one here. This is why I came to you! To teach you that you can always trust God. And you can always trust Me. And ‘Underneath are the everlasting arms’ (Deut 33:27).” Yet again, our dear Jesus has blown my mind.
Jesus loves me! He who died, heaven’s gate to open wide;
He will wash away my sin, let His little child come in.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
Jesus loves me! He will stay close beside me all the way.
Thou hast bled and died for me. I will henceforth live for Thee.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– William B. Bradbury (1816-1868), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)